Search results

This is no country for young men. We see it in our environment and the data increasingly expose the reality. The labour force survey for the first quarter of the year has reminded us once again: Spain’s youth unemployment rate, the benchmark for assessing the situation of people aged under 25, remains extraordinarily high, at 40%.

In 2024, Spain’s real estate market enjoyed a remarkable recovery, with a significant increase in both house prices and sales. Factors such as the growth of gross disposable income, foreign demand and falling rates drove this trend. In this article, we unveil our forecasts for 2025 and explain why we expect this boom to continue.

In the midst of the storm sparked by the pandemic, the real estate market has maintained a positive tone. Although the heightened uncertainty and the restrictions led to the postponement of home purchase decisions, prices decelerated only slightly and still rose by around 8% in 2020.

The CaixaBank Research real estate clock shows the evolution of home prices and sales in Spain throughout the cycle. In 2024, the «clock» will remain in the slowdown quadrant, before giving way to 2025, when we expect the housing market to return to expansive territory.

Five months after the last update to our macroeconomic forecast scenario, we have incorporated newly available information and re-examined the main factors dominating the outlook for Spain’s economy.

The 12-month Euribor has rallied from –0.50% at the end of 2021 to over 1.0% in the second half of June, its highest level since early 2014. Why has it increased and what impact does this have on the economy? What can we expect over the coming months?

Although the savings rate in the US today is well below pre-pandemic levels, the savings accumulated during 2020 and 2021 due to the mobility restrictions and fiscal stimulus measures could continue to favour consumption in the remainder of 2022 and in 2023.

The new Strategic Project for Economic Recovery and Transformation («PERTE» project) approved by the government in May could provide a boost to the Spanish automotive industry, one of the hardest hit by the current shortage of microchips, which are increasingly necessary for the production of electric vehicles.

While in December 2022 our GDP growth forecast for 2023 was 1%, finally the Spanish economy has managed to grow by an impressive 2.5%, in spite of the geopolitical uncertainty, persistent high inflation (despite its decline in recent months) and rising interest rates.

We disaggregate job creation among the main branches of economic activity in order to assess whether the improvement in the labour market is widespread or is concentrated in certain sectors and is due to specific factors.

We are therefore heading towards a context with higher tariffs and in which, most likely, there will be some reconfiguration of global value chains in an attempt to compensate, insofar as possible, for the loss of attractiveness of the US market. Consequently, we are moving towards a world with greater fragmentation, lower economic growth and the risk of higher inflation.

As we approach the end of a year characterised by uncertainty and volatility in the economic and financial variables, the sensation is that the global economy is capable of absorbing the effects of the supply shocks, the increase in geopolitical risk and the rising interest rates much better than had been anticipated at the end of the summer.

In the US, two major economic investment and modernisation plans have been launched in recent years which represent a very different model from the European one, with a more protectionist approach. The transformative efforts in energy and technology did not arise from the need to boost the economy after COVID, as was the case in the euro area with the European NGEU funds, but rather from the need to strengthen the US’ autonomy and strategic position.

The NGEU funds and the national investment programmes in Germany and France are the result of a long process of changes in the big economic blocs, accelerated by COVID and the war in Ukraine. These efforts seek to redefine and adapt production models to the energy transition and digitalisation in a context of uncertainty and new geopolitical dynamics.